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Cisco Turns on the Fog Machine at IoT Evolution Expo

Fog computing has been a central theme of IoT Evolution Expo, which is taking place this week in Las Vegas, and Cisco Systems has been one of the main participants providing insight on this important topic.

The interplay between cloud and fog was the theme of the keynote speech presented last night by Rodolfo Milito, senior technical leader at Cisco. Chuck Byers of Cisco spoke in a breakout session on drones Wednesday morning about the role of fog computing relative to future ground-based infrastructure to support unmanned aerial vehicles. Gyana Dash of Cisco was among the speakers at Tuesday night’s Presentation Theater, where he talked about how fog computing can help enable a smart lighting solution. And Cisco and various other companies are represented at the Fog Computing Analytics & Data conference collocated with IoT Evolution Expo.

Milito explained that fog computing, which sits below the cloud layer to allow for faster and more localized decision making, provides a common architecture for industrial IoT. While the cloud is global in time and space, he said, the fog is local in time and space. Fog computing, he added, is a must have for some applications, and a nice to have for other applications.

And Dash talked about how fog computing can be used to help sense natural sunlight and trigger blinds to open and lights to shut off to make better use of lighting and energy resources. In an environment with one commercial light at 75 Watts, and 120 window lights per building at 9000 Watts, the potential energy savings would be on the order of $236,000, he said. This proof of concept involves Phidget light sensors and USB PoE connecting via IP to a fog node IoT gateway. That connects via IP to an app that connects via HTTP to a Wink device, which uses Zigbee and Z-wave to communicate with lights and blinds.